Off The BallIreland's most popular sports show and winner of a record nine PPI radio awards hosted by Ger Gilroy, Kevin Kilbane and Joe Molloy. Monday to Thursday from 7pm - 10pm, Fridays from 7pm - 9pm, Saturdays from 1pm - 6pm and Sundays from 12pm - 6pm.

In April this year, during the early stages of the EU referendum campaign, Mr Johnson was accused of "dog-whistle" racism by political opponents after he referred to President Barack Obama's "part-Kenyan" heritage.

The attack came after Mr Obama issued a controversial warning during a visit to London that the UK would be "at the back of the queue" in trade deals with the US if it left the EU.

In a newspaper column, he attacked the American leader for removing a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House in 2009. "Some said it was a snub to Britain," he wrote.

"Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president's ancestral dislike of the British empire - of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender."

Also in April, he won £1,000 in a competition for the most offensive poem on Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, run by the Spectator magazine, in which he described the leader having sex with a goat and calling him a "w*******".

"No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird."

On China, which hosted the 2008 Olympic Games which he attended as London mayor-elect, he said: "Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase."

And at the end of the Beijing games, at the celebration of London winning the Olympics in 2012, he said in a flamboyant speech: 'Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called wiff-waff!

"And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world.

"Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it and saw an opportunity to play wiff-waff."

Of the former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, he said: "My speaking style was criticized by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg."

But despite his earlier enthusiasm for the European Union, most of his undiplomatic outbursts have been directed at the EU.

"First they make us pay in our taxes for Greek olive groves, many of which probably don't exist," he once said.

"Then they say we can't dip our bread in olive oil in restaurants. We didn't join the Common Market - betraying the New Zealanders and their butter - in order to be told when, where and how we must eat the olive oil we have been forced to subsidise."

His new job as Foreign Secretary will make or break him.

If he curbs his gaffe-prone tendencies - which many Conservative MPs are convinced he is incapable of doing - he will emerge as a contender to be the next Conservative Party leader after Theresa May.

But if "Carry On Boris" carries on blundering and falls off the political zip wire, the new Prime Minister's gamble will have failed.

At the same time, however, she will have killed off his Tory leadership ambitions and his potential threat to her during her premiership.

Off The Ball

Ireland's most popular sports show and winner of a record nine PPI radio awards hosted by Ger Gilroy, Kevin Kilbane and Joe Molloy. Monday to Thursday from 7pm - 10pm, Fridays from 7pm - 9pm, Saturdays from 1pm - 6pm and Sundays from 12pm - 6pm.